Blind alleys are familiar streets in literary biographies. Writers
seem to lose their way just when they ought to be going strongas
Melville, after writing Moby Dick, turned out the weird, confused, unreadable Pierre.
Sometimes writers escape quickly; sometimes, like Melville, they are gone for good.
But when a writer begins to follow his genius up a blind alley, all that admirers can do
is wait and hope they will return together.

That Elizabeth Madox Roberts was lost in one of these treacherous
literary culs-de-sac became painfully...